Page 17 of No Greater Sorrow (Our Lady of Fire #2)

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THE BARGAINER

“The true scope of the Second’s power is a question that has plagued occultists and scholars since the first rudimentary studies of the Otherlanders. As the first among the Knowing Ones, he certainly shares their gifts. However, we know little beyond that. Though it is said that the Second detests being referred to as a god, it is undeniable that he would be perceived as one by any human he encountered.”

—Excerpt from Ten Myths of the Otherlanders by Emiel Nasir.

“Aleja! Aleja, wake up. You have to go to your Trial.”

Garm’s cold nose pressed against her cheek. Aleja remembered coming to as the forest collapsed around her. It was the dead Throne that saved her in the end. A tree had fallen onto the swell of the Throne’s ribcage, and its trunk stopped just inches from Aleja’s face.

But after that, all was dark.

“Trial? Where’s Nicolas?” she moaned. The air had a medicinal scent, indicating that she was back in the healer’s tent, but the Knowing One was not squeezed onto the small cot beside her.

“I woke him too,” Garm said. Though his breath smelled of raw milk, Aleja welcomed it; the fact that she could smell anything meant she was still alive. “The Second demands he comes with you.”

“ What ?” she said, forcing herself up despite the wave of dizziness.

“The Trial is designed for two. With Violet gone, the Second wants Nicolas to take her place.”

Aleja thought she could sit up, but she was wrong. Bending over the edge of the bed, she attempted to retch into a chamber pot, but missed. At least, there was hardly any food left in her stomach. The liquid from her mouth was clear and tasted like tart fruit that hadn’t been allowed to ripen.

“The Second can’t do that,” she said, as soon as she was able to still her heaving stomach and wipe her mouth clean. In truth, her mind was still on Violet—on the way Violet had been unable to meet Aleja’s eyes, and how she’d immediately ceded to the Messenger’s orders.

“You can tell him that when you see him.”

“What happened?” Aleja asked. The past few hours felt like the times she’d spent too long in her grandmother’s tower, when the world had begun to break down, as if something had stepped on a completed puzzle. The pieces might be mostly in place, but they were no longer connected.

They’d met the Third. She had given him her sickle and in exchange, he had gifted her with knowledge. The tiny box in her backpack contained the fingerbones of the Dark Saint of Wrath—sliced off by her own hand. After that, there had been vibration and pain and betrayal. And both Val and Violet, standing with the Messenger.

Fuck them both , she thought bitterly.

“As far as we know, the Astraelis have the Third,” Garm said darkly. “You and Nicolas were both quite battered when we found you, but there was another witness. Val told us everything that happened.”

“Val? He’s here? No . He’s a traitor. We have to?—”

“He’s in chains again. He claims he refused to return to the Astraelis realm with his mother. The Knowing One will decide his fate after the Trial.”

“And Violet?” Aleja asked, hating that she cared.

“Gone with the Messenger,” Garm told her, a mournful note in his voice.

Aleja felt ill again. She doubled over, but this time, the bile couldn’t make it past her throat. An acidic pain lingered inside of her, trailing back to her belly. “The Messenger could have killed me, but she didn’t. Again ,” she said.

“Val claims there is much we don’t understand, but there’s no time now. We must get you to the Trial. An Avisai is already waiting.”

“Garm, I can’t—I’m too weak—and I lost my sickle.”

“You can do it because you have to.” Garm’s voice edged on a threatening growl. “Get up, Aleja. You still have a weapon, remember? Me .”

Aleja didn’t ask Garm how Nicolas was faring. She’d seen the way he paled while using the last bit of magic he had to flood Aleja’s veins with his shadows, so she would have the strength to keep the Messenger at bay for a few moments.

“I’m ready,” she said. “Let me… fuck. Let me get my boots on. Please, Garm, wait outside. I’ll be right there.”

“Of course, Lady of Wrath.”

She waited until his tail disappeared through the tent flaps before burying her face in her hands. Aleja had grown up believing she was about to die at any moment. She’d watched her aunt transform into a flock of crows. She’d spent years thinking that her grandmother was trapped in an eternal nightmare and six months believing that her best friend was missing in the wilderness.

She’d thought she knew what unbearable pain felt like.

And she’d been wrong.

No tears would come. Just a shocked numbness, as if her brain had shut down before she could process the reality of her situation—a sort of safety mechanism meant to spare her from breaking down completely.

Violet had betrayed her. Nicolas was dying. The Dark Saints lived, but for how long, now that the Third was with the Astraelis?

Stop , she eventually told herself. You can cry when you’ve survived.

She placed her feet on the cool ground, one at a time. A blister on her heel broke as she pulled her socks over it, soaking into the fabric as her boots followed. Aleja searched the medical tent for anything sharp to take with her—a knife, a scalpel, even a pair of heavy scissors. But in the end, she couldn’t bring herself to steal supplies from healers who would need them desperately in the days to come, and all she found seemed useless, anyway.

Sunlight made her squint as she pushed the tent flaps open and stepped outside. Bonnie and Taddeas were a few yards away, huddled with Orla and the officer Silmiya. Aleja forced herself not to turn away from the blankets draped over dead soldiers. A muddy boot stuck out of one. She caught herself waiting for it to move, as if the person underneath would realize their foot was cold and pull it back inside.

To Aleja’s surprise, it was Orla who approached her first. One of her gold studs was missing, and the others were dulled by soot. “Sorry about your friend,” Orla said quietly.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Aleja said.

Perhaps she caught the way Aleja’s eyes scanned the camp for Nicolas because Orla said, “He’s waiting for you with the Avisai.”

“What if the Astraelis attack again while we’re gone?”

“They already have what they want. They barely even…” Orla looked over her shoulder and met Taddeas’s eyes; he gave a small nod, confirming some silent request. “They didn’t come here to kill us. Hellfire, I’m certain they took more losses than we did. Their only interest was capturing the Third. Something is going on, Aleja. Something we don’t have intelligence on.”

“And Val?” Aleja said.

“We’ll be creative when we question him. That’s not why I stopped you. Here. I want you to have this.” Orla reached to her side and removed a black-bladed sword from her hilt. It was nearly identical to the one Nicolas carried on his back.

“I can’t—” Aleja began. “I don’t know how to use it.”

“Maybe a part of you remembers.”

“But it’s yours ,” Aleja insisted.

Orla rolled her eyes. “It’s just a sword, Lady of Wrath. Merit has been churning them out non-stop since he got here. He’ll have a new one ready for me by this afternoon. Take it. It doesn’t take a healer to know that your magic is depleted.”

The sword was unwieldy in Aleja’s hand. She wondered if any of her old fencing training would kick in if she were forced to use it. “Why are you finally being nice to me?” she grumbled.

“Honestly? It was pathetic seeing you writhe around in that medic’s tent, and yet, you’re like a sopping wet kitten I can’t help but take care of. Be careful, Aleja. The last Trial is always the worst. We can have a proper row when you’re a Dark Saint.”

“Fucking great.”

“Just survive it and we can pretend this never happened, okay?” Orla’s brilliant hair reflected the dawn light—red on red.

Garm nudged her side. “We should go.”

Taddeas and Bonnie looked too stricken to speak, but they pulled Aleja into a tight hug. Aleja’s body was so bruised that it hurt, but Taddeas looked worse off than her. His left eye was swollen, and the pale scar that cut across his brow had warped into the shape of a wave.

When he opened his mouth, she knew he was going to apologize for whatever had happened while they were away. “Don’t,” she blurted out. “Nothing was your fault. When I come back from the Trial, we’ll figure out a way to pay them back.”

“Okay,” he said, so low and quiet, as if the shyness that used to plague him in her presence had returned.

Aleja let herself be led away by Bonnie next. “I have to tell you something,” she said, leaning in close. “Violet and I, we…”

“What? Oh ,” Aleja said. Dammit. She should have seen this coming a mile away. Violet always did have a weakness for a woman who could cook. “She didn’t tell me.”

Another thorn shoved into her heart. She was so used to them that the sensation was almost comforting.

“Please don’t blame her. I asked Violet to keep it quiet. There was so much going on, with the Astraelis and the Trials. I didn’t want it to become another distraction.” Bonnie sighed. Even her curls seemed to deflate, falling limp around her face. “I know no one will believe me, but I swear, Violet wouldn’t betray us of her own accord. If she went with the Messenger, then there is something else going on. Something she didn’t think she could tell us.”

Violet is a good actress , Aleja wanted to scream. Violet used to smile convincingly for pictures while her body was beset by cancer. They’d known each other for years, and yet Violet had still managed to hide the fact that she’d drunk water from an Unholy Well in an attempt to cure herself of the illness she was also concealing.

Aleja kept her mouth shut. Bonnie, for the first time since Aleja had known her, looked as vulnerable as Aleja had felt when she first saw the tattoo spreading across Nicolas’s chest.

“Maybe she’ll come back,” Aleja said. The words were bitter in her mouth; a lie that was understood to be a lie by everyone listening, but no one called out because acknowledging the truth was more painful than accepting the falsehood.

But after a moment, Bonnie’s eyes hardened. “Stop it. I’m old, Al—the oldest among the Dark Saints. The years of my life can be measured in the thousands. I don’t want sympathy, and I don’t want kind lies. I just want to you make me a single promise. You do not let Violet die, no matter what you find out. Even if it’s all true, even if she betrayed us, you bring Violet back as a prisoner of war. But you don’t let her die.”

“I’ll try.”

“That’s not good enough. I need you to swear to me.”

“Bonnie, I?—”

“Swear it.”

“Fuck, okay. I swear.”

“Good. I have your word as a Dark Saint, then?”

Aleja knew this meant something important. Something with a magic of its own. “Yes. You have my word.”

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